Doxpop - Tools for Attorneys and Public Information Researchers: September 2014

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Problem with Morgan County Circuit Court Cases. (Will be fixed by 9/19)

A recent bulk file received from the State Court Administration's JTAC group omitted cases from Morgan Circuit court, and applying this file to replace our current data resulted in the deletion of all active cases in Morgan Circuit Court. Until the cases are restored, any search depending on data from this court will be incomplete.

Inactive cases and information on actions prior to August 1 for active cases remain available, and no other court was affected by this problem.

A sharp-eyed user reported the problem yesterday. We notified the folks at JTAC early in the afternoon, and they are sending the missing cases right now. Everyone involved responded with admirable speed. It will take several hours for the information to load, but we can confidently predict that the process will complete by tomorrow morning (9/19/14) at the latest.

Users who have watches on cases in Morgan Circuit Court or any other search "watch" that would be triggered by a reload of this court's data may receive spurious notifications due to the reload.

Apologies to our users for any inconvenience this may have caused. We do our very best to provide you with uninterrupted access to current information, but sometimes occurrences outside of our organization create interruptions that we can't prevent.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to call our office at 866-369-7671 or eMail support@doxpop.com.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Sorting now retained when returning to results lists.

A few months ago, Doxpop released a feature that allowed users to re-sort their search results on any column by clicking on the up/down arrows in the heading.

Although this was a great feature, our users quickly pointed out that it had a big flaw... The list always reverted to the default order when returning to it after viewing results, requiring the user to re-sort every time after viewing details. After a collective "D'oh!" moment, we sent a request to fix this off to the programmers.

This problem has now been fixed, so you can really start making good use of the column sorting feature!

Note also that there's a new "reset sorting" link in the upper right corner. That's there in case you want to get back to the original default sorting order.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Monroe County Recorder Joins Doxpop!

It has been a long journey! The Monroe County Courts were the first county office to partner with Doxpop, so it is exciting to finally add the Monroe County Recorder's Office to our family of Doxpop local government partners.

This has been a bittersweet process for us because we started working with Jim Fielder to make Recorded Documents available online. We are grateful to Jeff Ellington for continuing to move this project forward after Jim passed away in May. Jeff Ellington brought this project to completion, but it is also a legacy for Jim Fielder. We appreciate both of these far-sighted leaders.

Both the index and images for documents filed after January 1, 1991 are now available on the Doxpop web site. Basic information is available at no cost. Detailed information and document images are available as a fee-based service for professional users.

This new service is being provided by the County Recorder's Office at no cost to the taxpayers of Monroe County. The access provided by this service is in addition to the public access already provided at the Recorder's Office.

Doxpop and the Recorder will be providing a training session for the public in the next few weeks. Please contact Jeff Ellington, Monroe County Recorder for details. Jeff Ellington may be reached at (812) -349-2520.

Friday, September 5, 2014

Pulaski County Recorder Joins Doxpop

Doxpop is pleased to announce that the Pulaski County Recorder is now providing
access to Pulaski County's Recorded documents through Doxpop.

The index to documents and document images filed in January, 1994 or later are now
available on-line at http://www.doxpop.com. Basic information about the documents is
available at no cost. Detailed information and documents images are available as a fee-
based service.

In addition, The Recorder's Office now offers a free property watch service to our
community. Any person may sign up at http://watch.doxpop.com to set a watch on his or
her property and name. Participants are notified via email any time a document is filed
that references the watched property or name.

Both of these services have been provided without any use of public funding (no use of
tax money.) The access provided by these services is in addition to the public access
already provided at the courthouse.

For additional information, contact Christi at the Recorder's Office, (574) 946-3844 or
Nick Fankhauser at Doxpop, LLC; (765) 373-9245; nickf@doxpop.com.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Vanderburgh moves to Odyssey - Access for Doxpop users is unaffected.

Vanderburgh County moved their court case information to the Odyssey system over the labor day weekend. This move does not significantly affect Doxpop users because Doxpop buys access from JTAC to a real-time feed of court data from the Odyssey system. Our customers' access to Vanderburgh court information will not be interrupted during the transition.
During the next month, we will maintain all of the old information, but as new cases are filed, or existing cases updated on the Odyssey system, we will add those as well. After a month, we'll merge the data so that all of the old information is completely replaced with the version found on the new system.

A few of the services we provide will look odd during the transition, because there will be a short period when both the old data and the new data are available for some cases. In particular:
  • If you use the personal calendar feature, you will see two colors for Vanderburgh County on your calendar. Every event will be available, but the older cases will have a different color from the newer cases. When we complete the merge process, these will go back to being a single color.
  • When you look at our "County Details Page", you will find two entries for each court until the merge is complete.
  • When you are doing searches, you will find two entries for some cases. This is because while we are loading the information from Odyssey, we will also be maintaining the old data until the operation is complete to ensure you don't miss anything. When you see two case entries, please look at both to ensure you have the most current information.
  • If you use any of our "watch" services to keep an eye on cases or people of interest, we will be moving those watches over so they point to the cases and people that are a part of the Odyssey data feed. We run a process to convert these several times each day, but it is possible for notification of events to slip through the cracks between conversion runs so you may want to periodically do a manual check until things are back to normal.
Finally, one deficiency in the Odyssey system is that financial information is not exported in their data feed, so that detail will not be available after the transition. We regularly ask that JTAC add this to the data feed, but so far, we are told that it is not allowed because the clerks using the Odyssey system have requested that JTAC not make that information available to us. If this information is important to you, please encourage the clerks you work with to tell JTAC differently so we can get the information back online.

As always, we are available to answer any questions in person, so don't hesitate to call support at 866-369-7671 if you have any questions.